Do you care Apple is worth $300 billion?

I sure don't. Otherwise I would have joined the cacophony writing about Apple's market capitalization milestone yesterday. I see the $300 billion valuation as another excuse for pageview-obsessed bloggers and journalists and hype-seeking Wall Street analysts and investors to write even more about Apple. It's great news for driving the share price higher.

From one perspective, Apple's valuation achievement is so impressive it shouldn't be ignored. Following the Sept. 29, 2008 stock market collapse, Apple's valuation plummeted. Apple's market cap was a mere $88.68 billion on Oct. 2, 2008, down by nearly half from a month earlier. Apple's stock price comeback is nothing short of miraculous over the past two years. In late May, Apple's market capitalization topped Microsoft.

But the miracle is as much about hype as execution. If you follow analyst reports, blog posts, news stories and forum chatter, the measure of Apple's success isn't the now but the future. What will Apple do next? How many widgets will Apple sell this quarter or next? Wall Street lives by rumors -- buyers and sellers getting high on the endorphine rush. They're rumor addicts, as is the overly-Apple obsessed blogger and news media rumor rabble, who write amazing fictional accounts of the company's next big thing. Most of the time, the rumors are wrong.

The rumors make Apple's success bigger than it is and feeds the trading frenzy around the stock. In three long posts over the last 13 months -- "Are Apple stock price gains the reason for recent tablet rumors? "; Be smart, don't buy into iPad hype"; and "Of course media bias favors Apple" -- I explicitly explained how rumors influence Apple's share price. Matters are worse now that Apple is having real mass market success with iOS products. The rumormongers can't get high often enough.

Please don't misunderstand. I don't fault Apple's business and product execution. Sales success of iPad and iPhone are deserved, and the reasons often have little to do with good design taste -- something else bloggers and journalists often overemphasize. Apple built a broad developer, retail and accessory manufacturer ecosystem around iPod that it deftly extended to iPhone and iPad. Then there is Apple marketing, which is clever and continuous. Mix in Microsoft stumbles in mobile and with Windows Vista and shifting computing and informational relevance from PCs to cloud-connected devices, and you've got a recipe for success.

But it's not success around which rumors roar or Apple's share price soars. Yesterday's many $300 billion valuation stories was the rarest of Apple gushing -- a meaningful accomplishment now rather than something that might happen someday. Still, there is irony, that rumors and speculation played an important role in Apple topping $300 billion market capitalization.

Of all yesterday's stories, I was most surprised by MG Siegler's post at TechCrunch: "Apple: Actually, $50 Billion Isn't Cool Either. You Know What's Cool? $300 Billion." Over the New Years holiday weekend, a Goldman Sachs-led investment in Facebook pushed the social network's valuation to $50 billion. In the strangest of comparisons, Siegler diminished Facebook's valuation against Apple's -- private company against public one. Seriously, Siegler should come out of the Apple opium room for some fresh air and fresh perspective.

For the monkeys tapping the buttons for that next rumor-driven high, whether it's the joy of pageviews or making a few more shekels investing, Apple is by far more important. But to the world at large, Facebook's influence is significantly more important than Apple's. The social network tangibly impacts the lives of over 500 million subscribers where it matters most to them -- relationships. In the six-and-a-half years since its public launch, Facebook has gone from a gathering place for college students to being a real dot-com success story. Last year, Facebook edged out Google as most visited website in the United States, according to Hitwise.

The point: There are plenty of other technology companies changing peoples' lives. Cacophony about Apple drowns out some of the well-deserved noise about other great companies. I sure would like to hear about some techs other than Apple this week, particularly with tomorrow night's Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer keynote officially launching the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show. Apple isn't even attending CES.

I wrap up by asking Betanews readers to answer question: Do you care Apple is worth $300 billion? Should anyone else? Please respond in comments.